If you've ever looked at Erlang's data model briefly and gone "what the heck is with the immutability and lack of user-defined structures, etc.", have another l

If you've ever looked at Erlang's data model briefly and gone "what the heck is with the immutability and lack of user-defined structures, etc.", have another look at it from this point of view of distribution. It's the secret decoder ring of "why did Erlang do it that way?" With another ~25 years of collective experience, if somebody took a shot at it today I think we could make some improvements, but it was pretty far ahead of its time, and can still pull some stunts almost nothing else can, or at least not without creating "an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of [Erlang]", to tweak Greenspun a bit.